Lene

Lene is a young woman Goldmund encounters in a city devastated by the plague. She leaves the city with him, becomes his loving companion in a makeshift woodland home, and dies of the disease there. Her brief relationship with Goldmund joins the intimacy of shelter and care to the story’s recurring awareness that love and life are vulnerable to sudden loss.

Encounter and Departure

Goldmund sees Lene at an upper-floor window, combing her hair, as he walks through an otherwise silent city. When she looks down and blushes, he calls up to ask whether she is sick and urges her to leave with him. He tells her that they can escape the plague and live in the woods; after he walks away and returns, she is still at the window, and then runs after him before the city gates with a small bundle and a red kerchief tied around her head.

Lene gives her name and agrees to go, saying that the city is horrible and everyone is dying. Her decision is presented as an immediate response to the danger around her, not as the result of a settled plan. Goldmund’s other companion, Robert, objects to bringing someone from the plague-stricken city, but Goldmund insists that Lene will stay with him and proposes that all three find an empty hut or build one. He imagines a household in which he is its head, Lene its mistress, and Robert their friend; Robert eventually accepts the arrangement.

A Woodland Household

The next day the three find an empty log cabin in a small birch forest. Goldmund assigns Robert, who had once worked as a cabinetmaker, to build a partition, while he and Lene gather straw, fern, and moss for their sleeping places. Their supplies are limited: initially they have little beyond goat’s milk, and Goldmund goes out to search for food. The work of making a home gives their days a shared purpose, even as the surrounding region remains sparsely inhabited and difficult to provision.

The partition grows from a coarse fence of small birch posts into a more finished division with openings filled by plaited juniper. Lene gathers berries and tends the goats while Goldmund searches the neighborhood; the group also finds an abandoned hut, catches stray chickens, and discovers a field of turnips. Robert is glad that their isolation seems to protect them from both contagion and conflict, though there is little food. The shelter gradually acquires improved beds and a hearth, and the three often sing while they work. This fragile domestic routine contrasts with the deaths and deserted homes they have encountered on the road.

Goldmund and Lene’s relationship is tender and intimate. He finds in her a shy, inexperienced but deeply loving companion, and listens to her breathing after she falls asleep. Yet their shared refuge does not make his life’s impulse to wander disappear. As summer nears its end, Lene speaks of autumn and the future, and tells him that she thinks she is pregnant and cannot let him leave again. Goldmund privately imagines departing, returning to Master Niklaus’s city for the winter, and eventually visiting Mariabronn and Narcissus. His thoughts reveal a conflict between the life Lene hopes to continue and his own recurrent desire to move on; the evidence does not establish whether her belief about pregnancy is confirmed.

Illness, Care, and Death

While Goldmund is away from the hut, a stranger attacks Lene. Goldmund hears her cries, finds her in distress, and intervenes. The episode marks a rupture in the small household’s security, but the account does not make the attack the cause of her later illness. The following day Lene becomes sick, and Goldmund discovers plague boils. He keeps the diagnosis from her, while Robert, suspicious that she has not recovered, decides to sleep outside and take the goat away to avoid infection. Goldmund angrily refuses to let him remove it from the hut’s partitioned side; Robert leaves without the animal and lies down nearby, frightened and alone.

Goldmund tells Lene that he will stay with her and that she will recover, but her condition worsens. He wants to escape into the open air and resume wandering, yet cannot bring himself to leave her alone while she is dying. Since she can no longer drink milk, he drinks it himself; at intervals he tends to her and gives her water. Her few words include Goldmund’s name and the endearment “lover.” She dies the following night without complaining. Goldmund remains beside her for a time, then lets the goat out and sleeps beside it until morning.

The next day he returns to the hut to see Lene’s face once more. He cannot leave her body in the dwelling, so he gathers dry wood and brush, sets the hut alight, and watches the fire consume it. He takes nothing away except the flint. Unable to kill the goat for food, he drives it into the heath and continues his journey. The destruction of the cabin ends the household they had built together; the fire serves as his farewell to Lene and to the brief life of shelter they had made.

Memory and Significance

After leaving the hut, Goldmund passes through plague-stricken communities where deserted houses, unburied dead, and fear have unsettled social life. He is no longer afraid of the disease, and his attention to death becomes part of his effort to look closely at the world rather than turn away. Lene’s death belongs to that larger landscape of loss, but it remains personal: in later reflection, Goldmund remembers the places and people scattered across his travels, and the charred remains of Lene among them.

When Goldmund later draws from memory, Lene is among the faces and scenes that emerge from the images he has carried within him. He draws her smiling with satisfaction, in the aftermath of the attacker’s death, and in the final night when her face seemed to return to the earth. The drawings make her more than a passing episode in his wandering: she becomes part of the remembered world he hopes to give lasting form. Later, when Goldmund thinks of the people who might endure in the enduring beauty of sculpture, he includes Lene among those he wishes he could preserve. Her story thus brings together the novel’s contrast between fleeting embodied life and the artistic effort to retain an image of what has been lost.